Grammar Girl here.
I talked with type and printing historian Glenn Fleischman back in February for the Grammarpalooza bonus segment, and he walked me through the wild mechanical journey a comic strip took to reach the newspaper page, right down to a week of Doonesbury strips that
That never officially ran because a Nixon aide resigned at the wrong moment.
I hope you enjoy our chat.
Greetings, Grammar Pelusians.
I'm here with Glenn Fleischman.
We just finished talking about the history of shouty caps and quotation marks in the main episode.
But for the bonus today, we're going to talk about his book, How Comics Are Made, which is obviously about how comics are made.
Glenn is a type historian, a printing historian.
He has been a printer with ink on his hands.
He's written more books than you can probably count.
Besides how comics are made, one of his recent books is Six Centuries of Type and Printing.
Glenn, welcome to the bonus segment.
Thank you so much.
Yeah, so I was excited to learn there's actually a comics museum.
Oh, yeah.
This is an amazing place at the Ohio State.
Since we're on a grammar podcast, Ohio State University insists they are the Ohio State University.
It's a trademark term.
So at the OSU in Columbus, Ohio, there's the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library Museum.
Which is an amazing institution.
It's full of curators who are doing scholarship or teaching about and doing scholarship on the history of comics from all different angles.
So it can be the history of gay and queer work.
It can be what was the earliest cartoons and newspapers published.
Comic book development, how comics influence novels, all this kind of thing.
And they also have an incredible museum space that unfortunately, as we speak, it's being renovated.
So I don't think it opens again for until later this year, maybe even 2027.
Like it's closed for several months.
It was kind of a it was a great space and they're actually improving it and putting some more permanent exhibition space.
But I've been there.
I think I've seen three or four different exhibitions there during my research trips to to go and work on the library part and get them to pull from their holdings.
Yeah.
And you have made this amazing resource about the production of comics.
So what was it that sort of set you on this path?
I always come back to this word flong.
It's F-L-O-N-G, which is my favorite word.
I learned about it in 2017.
And a flong is the technology that allowed the syndication of comics along with many, many other things.
In the 1800s, type was all set by hand until late in the 1800s.
And whenever you wanted to print a newspaper page, you'd have a bunch of typesetters working crazy hours, and every typesetter is sitting part of a page.
It's incredibly tedious.
Then once you have a page, you have a bunch of loose type that's locked into a frame, and it's printed onto a press.
And those presses were printing a sheet at a time, and they were fairly slow.
So, of course, if you could use a roll of paper, which was invented –
Continuous rolls of paper were invented in the early 1800s, surely you need a press that is also rotary, it's a cylinder.
So how do you take flat type and stick it onto a cylinder so it rolls around as the paper goes by
And the answer was a flong
And a flong is a
It's like a wood pulp material originally kind of more like paper mache, but it's kind of sheets of glue and tissue paper interleaved and they would be pushed down against a page of type.
Wow.
Wow.
And then you could just print.
It would go around in a circle as paper flowed through.
And suddenly you speed up the production of, say, newspapers or even some kinds of books by an order of magnitude, if not more, because it's just whisking through.
There's not sheet after sheet going down.
It's just this incredible, endless, super fast stream of paper.
Wow, it sounds like they would be super fragile, the flongs.
They're actually pretty robust.
I mean, I've only seen one historic flong because they were all just thrown away or burned, of course, because they were in ephemeral material.
There was nothing valuable about them.
But in my reading of them, they were actually pretty rigid because once they were dry, because they were full of like paste and other substances, they held their form enough to pour hot lead in and have the lead come off as a piece and not get residue of the plate.
So this sounds like it's totally unrelated to the history of comics, but I discovered flong.
And the reason flong is important is it shifts from being this very elaborate process with paste and other stuff into being an industrial process where companies would produce flong as raw sheets that were called dry flong versus the older wet flong and dry flong as an industrial product.
Could be used much more readily.
Each printing company, each newspaper didn't have to pour and make its own flong.
They just bought it from the literally called wood flong company.
They'd buy massive sheets of this stuff and then they could just use it in their process as they went from setting type to going on the press.
But the other use, it's kind of like a photocopying machine.
I mean, very primitively.
So if you're – this is what got me down this path is if you're a comic syndicate and you're distributing your comic to 2,000 newspapers in 1920, my question was how?
How would you –
How would you do that?
I know you can make metal plates, which are etched in acid.
But each time you do that, it's this long, elaborate process.
It requires zinc plates.
It's very expensive.
It just takes a long time.
So I thought they must have had some kind of mass reproduction technology.
And the answer was they would make one plate, and from that, this hard metal plate would be then pressed against flong material, and then the syndicate would make 1,000, 2,000 pieces of flong
These pieces of essentially something like a thick cardboard and they sent those out to newspapers.
The newspapers would take the flong and then cast a metal plate from that and then lay it out on their newspaper pages.
So without flong, that's also advertising copy spread.
Mostly they're advertisements and even some other miscellaneous material like a primitive kind of clip art.
You could buy clip art as a newspaper as sheets of flog and they would send you these companies would send you a monthly subscription of things like Santa Claus and candy canes and whatever.
You just cut them out, pour them in lead and then to stick them on your newspaper layout.
So how long would it take from when a cartoonist drew the comic to when it would actually be printed in the paper if it had to go through all these different processes?
It took weeks, but most of that nothing was happening.
It was the cartoonists are always the bottleneck.
I can find all these notes about syndicates begging cartoonists to get their stuff in on time because they needed weeks to go through each step of the process, but the process itself didn't take weeks.
So cartoonists were supposed to turn their strips in as much as nine weeks ahead of when they ran, but that was because they didn't trust the cartoonists to do it.
But there was – there's this whole process.
So the cartoonist handed a strip after it had been approved by the syndicate to make sure of language or typos or whatever.
It would go through this process where a photographic negative was made.
The negative is then handed off to – and reduced in size.
And sometimes different newspapers –
Had different size requirements.
They might do a negative reproduction at different sizes of the original strip, which was drawn sometimes two or three times larger than the size as it would appear in the newspaper.
The negative will be handed to the engraver – or sorry, the etchers who would take a zinc plate and with an acid process, after exposing the plate onto a photosensitized surface on the zinc, they would literally etch the metal away to produce a plate with a raised surface
That was the comic.
Then that would be sent to another part of the operation that would make the flong.
The flongs would be sent off by railroad car or U.S. Post.
The newspapers would get them, cast them in metal, put them on their pages, and finally go into newspapers.
But each step, like the engraver, it might only take an engraver
It wasn't a half an hour per strip.
They were working in a mechanical process.
So maybe they would process, I don't know, like 50 strips a day or something like that.
They make that many plates because there could have been 10 different people involved.
There could be multiple vats of acid.
I mean, it's such a funny thing where you're like, to make a comic strip, you needed a lot of sulfuric acid.
Yeah.
And you kind of talk about the changing technology and how that sort of changes what people are doing with comics.
Yeah, because this process, this whole weird thing, even though there's literally eight steps between a cartoonist's hand and ink and it appearing in a newspaper and you think the fidelity would be so poor.
Sometimes it was.
If you look at old comics, sometimes you're like, wow, this looks like it was printed by a potato.
And sometimes you're thinking, gosh, how did they preserve this much detail and beauty in something that had this many mechanical reproduction, this many generations?
But instead of being a bad photocopy –
Typically, the quality was preserved remarkably well, but over time, those steps reduced.
So instead of – at a certain point, photographic processes start being used instead of the flog.
So newspapers, instead of receiving something they have to cast, they get a photostat, which is just like basically a black and white photographic print on a –
A flat like non reflective paper that was shot in a special kind of camera from the original artwork.
And so they some newspapers would take that and then they might make a plate or they might actually do some work on their end.
But three generations of reproduction were removed on the syndicate part.
And then eventually you get to a point where the layout is all photographic.
So all the type is being set photographically or the photo type setting, all the artwork and the comics are all being laid out in a page as essentially physical visual elements that are then photographed as a sheet.
And from that full page, the printing plate is made.
Yeah.
And you're talking about the size of the drawing reminded me, you interviewed the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, who is famously very private.
And one of the things you asked him was about the size.
So talk about how did you even get to talk to him?
Well, it's interesting.
I'm just this random person.
The first edition of the book was a Kickstarter.
Now it's the second edition, which is very similar, is being produced by Andrews McNeil Publishing, which is itself a sibling company to the biggest cartoon syndicate in the United States that syndicates Calvin and Hobbes and Doonesbury and a lot of strips that are –
A lot of popular strips.
They kind of, I think King syndicate is the number two and, and Andrews McNeil universal is the number one.
But when I was on my own, I thought, how am I going to get cartoonists to talk to me?
And so I just, I have some friends who are cartoonists.
I got referrals.
But I also just said, hey, here's something I think you'd never been asked.
I'm writing a book about how you think about a line.
Like, tell me how you conceive of a line for reproduction.
How did you think about how color worked?
Because until relatively recently, like the 90s, late 90s,
Cartoonist had to specify color and someone else engravers or other people did the work in a production stage.
So the cartoonist never drew their final color.
They could only indicate it.
And then also, how did you think about reproduction?
Like, did you go and look at newspapers and change how you drew or your process based on what came out?
And apparently a lot of cartoonists, many of them said to me, no one has ever asked me these questions before.
And some were like, I've been dying to talk about this part of the craft because it's just everyone's like, where do you get your ideas from?
They want to talk about the story.
But a lot of cartoonists are crafts people or artists and a combination, obviously.
So I went to Bill Watterson's editor and said, do you think Bill would, Mr. Watterson would answer these questions?
And he said, I don't know, let me ask him.
And within a day, I got a response.
So editor with an intermediary, I sent a couple rounds of questions back and forth.
And and Bill was just I think he was I feel like he was tickled to be asked about something that no one had asked him about.
You know, he doesn't give that many interviews.
He used to do much more when Calvin Hobbes was running in for a little bit after that.
And it was lovely to find out his process, partly the idea that he drew pretty close to size because it was cheaper to use smaller paper.
And I'm thinking, my God, man, you sold 65 million copies.
Now he's sold 65 million copies of Calvin Hobbes, but he was parsimonious because he started out as an illustrator at a library.
Out of a newspaper, the Cleveland newspaper.
And I think he always, you know, at some point huge success came in, but I think he was always kind of like the struggling artist.
And so why would he draw bigger?
And then once you get used to something, he was used to drawing close to size.
You just keep drawing close to size.
What else did you learn that would surprise people?
Oh, gosh, I'm trying to think about that.
I think it was interesting to talk to cartoonists.
I think about how disassociated they were from the production process.
Like many of them, it was just a big black box.
They would send their cartoon in to the syndicate and they would show up in the newspaper and they disassociated.
Some didn't care.
Some didn't know.
Some were kind of fascinated when I started to send the materials
Or I'd be like, hey, the guy who created Funky Winkerbean, whose name is escaping, Tom Batik, who gave me a lot of his time, Funky Winkerbean and Crankshaft, which are two kind of – they're sort of funky strips.
Like Funky is a good name and he did very interesting things with – Funky is now –
Run its course after, I think, almost 50 years where the characters grew up in big time shifts, like he would stop the strip and then move ahead a number of years.
And I'm like, hey, I found a stereotype, which is a name in printing for a metal plate cast from a flog.
I found a stereotype of your strip and he's like, huh, I've never seen that before.
But this is how I came to think of it as a weird thing that cartoonists were so removed from the production of their work because what other field of art has ever existed in which people who created the art never really kind of touched or were involved in the final product?
And so a lot of the cartoonists had that.
I guess I figured cartoonists would have more involvement or be talking to their syndicate more.
I have conversations with the printer.
I did find some great things like the great Kniff, Milt Kniff, who did Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon.
I think if I'm getting those strips right, I hope someone listening will be a comics fan and correct me.
He was an adventure cartoonist and did beautiful, beautiful work.
And I found letters at the Billy Ireland library and they have his papers for him writing a syndicate saying, I'm down in Florida and the paper reproduced down here did a terrible job on this and this.
Are you going to talk to them about it?
And then a letter back from the syndicate saying no.
We have limited control of what they do.
We've informed them of your displeasure.
We're going to keep monitoring the situation.
Or I'm searching around for Bill Watterson material and I find someone had posted literally a post-it note written in Bill's handwriting.
That was pasted on top of a memo from the company that did most of the color work, putting the color specified by cartoonists onto their Sunday comics.
It was a company based in Buffalo, American Color.
And it was a note from the desk of the guy who was kind of in charge of that part of the division.
To somebody in production saying, hey, some people really do care.
And Bill Watterson had written a note saying to the syndicate saying, tell American Caller great job on these two comics.
And it was two different ones.
So in the whole scheme of things is I got permission from Bill to reproduce his handwriting so I can reproduce that note.
And then from Andrews and Camille, I got permission to reproduce those two comics, both in newsprint kind of reproduction form and in their color original or the original line art form.
So the book demonstrates kind of exactly what Bill was complimenting and what was the complexity of those colors.
So that was sort of exciting to close this weird loop.
Nice.
Well, I was going to ask you if the changes in the technology changed the way the artists work, but it sounds like maybe it didn't.
Well, I actually have something in the works in my head about that.
There's an issue of resolution, not like scanning resolution or photo resolution, but cartoonists used to work with incredible detail.
And so the classic example is the guy who did Prince Valiant.
Can his name escaping me?
How it'll come back to me.
It's here.
It worked in enormously large size.
He drew these huge, huge original Sundays and the work is gorgeous.
And if you find old newspapers and,
And you find Prince Valiant and the detail because he worked at huge size.
He could work in detail that when shrunk would actually be reproduced through this absurd process I was describing.
So, oh, Hal Foster.
So over time, as comics shrunk and the production process kind of narrowed, so cartoonists became more and more responsible for.
And then eventually fully responsible for producing the final form of their work digitally that would then be produced in newspapers, the amount of detail disappears.
So you see strips get smaller and lose detail.
I mean, Peanuts is an interesting exception.
Because Peanuts was created partly – the brief that Charles Schulz had was to create something that was sort of simple in line art and would reproduce at a bunch of different sizes.
Think of it.
So his style didn't change very much over his 50-year career with Peanuts because –
It reproduced so well.
And at some point they demanded a minimum size so it wouldn't get smaller, like as tiny as some of the strips appear today.
But for other cartoonists, like if you look at Beetle Bailey, I know it's a funny example, but I was tracking it over a period of time and it used to be the backgrounds were
It wasn't like photorealistic backgrounds, but when the strips would run and they would be.
I don't know, four inches wide versus two inches today.
There was a lot more that could be expressed even in a strip like that.
But the more intricate strips, they just lose resolution.
You can't see the detail.
It's so small.
So the cartoonist have to then reduce the amount of detail they put in.
And I think the strips become less rich.
Yeah.
Well, I think the story of your eBay purchase is also really interesting and highlights some interesting things about the process of creating comics.
Oh, was that the Gary Trudeau?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, that was a great journey because I was writing – I can't even remember.
I think I was – oh, I just found out about Flong.
I saw this piece.
It was a sheet of six daily doomsday strips from 1973 go up for sale on eBay.
I think I spent $175 on it, which is a big purchase for me, but I was doing research.
And then I wound up writing an article about
That never ran sadly for a publication but they did pay me which was very nice of them and talking to Gary Trudeau via email back in 2017 or 2018 and then again for the book and he was so gracious with both permissions and his time and insight and
It was so very nice.
Again, famously a person who doesn't do interviews, but I was asking about something that was not the thing that everybody asks him about.
So he was happy to respond.
And so this sheet was six strips that had never run in their exact form in print, even though they were in flong, which means the syndicate had approved them.
It had sent them out so newspapers would get a sheet with all six strips for the week and cut them up for the dailies every week.
And when you bought them, you didn't know this.
No, I learned this in the process because I didn't know.
I thought they were sent out one at a time because everything I'd seen was a little strip.
And what it turned out is that John Ehrlichman had resigned in the period from when the strip was written and then produced in flog and was being sent out.
And when the week before the strips were to run, John Ehrlichman resigned.
So all the newspapers have this flog in hand.
And the strips were all about John Ehrlichman, who was one of Nixon's key aides.
So they didn't make any sense anymore.
So they swapped and the syndicate swapped in a different set of strips that were slightly out of – didn't make sense because they were about alumni reunion, which would have taken place weeks later.
And Trudeau reworked some of them and then ran some of them later, talking about Ehrlichman more in the past tense when it made more sense.
But it was funny to see comics that had, I mean, these are comics that had never run.
Trudeau had sort of forgotten about it a little bit.
And when I reminded him, he's like, oh, yeah, that was the week that made me tell the syndicate I'm only working like a week ahead of time.
But there was a technological change there, too, which was that at that point, 1973 was right when newspapers were kind of the middle of a slow burning change from all the metal and flog and other kinds of production.
To going to photographic methods and offset printing, which uses these thin, flat metal plates, and it's a very different process.
But everything's much faster, and there's almost no acid.
There's no acid and there's no lead.
So Trudeau was able to make a demand and the syndicate was able to let him do it because their turnaround time could suddenly be much faster in most cases.
And the newspapers all –
Just coped in it.
But there was a lot of FedEx didn't exist in 1973.
But there was a lot of curring and a lot of last minute work done and maybe some missteps when when he kept the deadline that short because he did not want to be behind a news story again.
Right.
Yeah, the politics overtook the political cartoon.
I imagine that that doesn't happen nearly as often today with things happening so much more quickly.
And with webcomics, do you want to talk a little bit about webcomics and their role in the industry?
Oh, sure.
I would say, too, it's like some comics are so much less political today.
And I mean, Doonesbury has been in reruns for decades now, the Daily Strip.
So the Sunday one, he still has to do somewhat in advance, more in advance than the regular.
But I think there's so much less contemporary information in comics that there's less of an issue with that.
Yeah.
Webcomics is it sort of started late 90s, early 2000s.
And some of the strips that were created then are still in existence this many years later.
And I think they started really as an imitation of newspaper strips.
And a lot of people who were early web cartoonists really wanted to be syndicated because that was the way you won.
You know, you're syndicated.
Suddenly you can making one hundred or two hundred thousand dollars a year if you were very successful.
Or you might make, you know, in 2000, you might make 30 or $40,000 a year and it's a side hustle or something you do partly in your spare time or, you know, maybe you do illustration as well.
And that went to being impossible.
It's only a handful of cartoonists to make any real money.
And there's just so few strips that are still out there.
But so web comics, I think, fill that gap is that over time, the form evolved from being an imitation of newspaper comics into something that is now.
Much broader array
So some people still do a newspaper format or they do a single panel format
Other people do
They might vary it like XKCD which is you know a long-running favorite strip Randall Munroe might do a
One day it might be like a standard cartoon strip and the next day it might be a scrolling zoomable you know five mile long
Where you can go and just keep scrolling and zooming in and out.
And he has all the freedom in the world because he's using a medium that he doesn't need to deal with any of the reproduction constraints for.
Yeah, he was also a guest on the show, actually.
Oh, that's great.
I really like his writing, too.
He's an amazing combination of somebody who took...
I mean, I don't know what his real cartooning artistic ability is, if that makes sense.
Like, he draws with a stick figure.
He also sometimes will reveal how he can kind of, quote-unquote, actually draw.
Like, if he...
Is trying to draw something more realistic.
And you're like, oh, this guy could kind of do what he wants.
But his writing is so good.
And he's developed an iconography of characters and forms that are, I think, are so rich, even though they seem so simple.
Yeah.
Well, after hearing this, I think a lot of people are going to want to read how comics get made.
Get made?
Is it?
Are made.
Are made.
Yeah.
I had a lot.
Let me tell you how many discussions I had about that title with other people because I was like, I don't know what to call this thing.
And my Kickstarter version was called How Comics Were Made.
Yeah.
And Andrews McNeil said, you know, we kind of think how comics are made.
Let's use the artificial present.
And I said, great.
You guys are the people who sell to bookstores, whatever you think.
Yeah, I keep having to go back and check the verb every time.
I can't remember how comics are made because it's still happening.
Get that book by Glenn Fleischman.
And Glenn, after people are finished reading your book, your books, because you have more, which they can find at glenn.fun, what are some books that you recommend?
What are some of your favorite books?
Oh, gosh.
I have to look over at my bookshelf and say what that is.
Oh, it's so funny that I can't think of that right away.
Isn't that terrible?
Well, as a Doonesbury fan, I'm looking over because it's right there, but it's true.
I'll use the Doonesbury theme.
Brian Walker is a comics historian who I leaned on both –
Let me do hours of interviews with him.
He's the son of Mort Walker, who created Beetle Bailey.
And so Brian is both a comics historian.
He was a curator at a comics museum that ran for decades that his father created.
And the Schultz family was instrumental in funding.
And then their whole collection is now at the Billy Ireland Museum.
So Brian also now continues to be part of the team that writes and creates Beetle Bailey.
There's Beetle Bailey, High and Lois, and Hagar the Horrible, which are two different families.
One does Hagar, one does Beetle Bailey, and the two together do High and Lois.
And I think they're at the third generation of family doing those strips.
So Brian has done a series of books about comics history, including a massive...
Two-volume set that's been reprinted as one that's kind of the entire history of newspaper comics.
And he did the thing that I love, which he's able to get permission to reproduce so many strips that you're not just reading about a strip.
You get to see what he's talking about over pages.
So he'll mention an artist.
He'll talk about a change.
He'll be looking at history and then show you page after page of examples from that period.
So but I particularly like he's got a book called Doonesbury and the Art of G.B.
Trudeau, which was he had known Gary Trudeau.
I think he interviewed him when he was when Brian was in college in the 70s.
He's known Gary for decades and he put out a book that looks into Gary Trudeau's art because Gary Trudeau has used an inker since the early 70s.
He started to miss deadlines and people have said, oh, Gary Trudeau doesn't draw his comics.
In fact, Gary did what they call the pencils.
He does the original work for all of his comics and he sends them to the inker.
And so this was sort of a celebration of Gary as an artist, even though he doesn't do the final production work.
And it was also sort of dispelling some of the myths.
But it's a very interesting book if you love Trudeau.
I mean, I've been reading Trudeau since I was a teenager and when I didn't understand all the politics and still read him today.
Awesome.
Well, thank you so much, Glenn Fleischman.
Again, his books are Six Centuries of Type and Printing, How Comics Are Made, and many more, actually.
So you really need to go to his website, which is glenn.fun, and you can see all the things he's up to.
Glenn, is there anything anywhere else you'd like to send people or anything else you'd like to recommend?
Oh, gosh, no.
I just hope everyone is donating to food banks and mutual support societies right now and helping everybody else in the world.
Yes.
Well, thank you so much for being here.
This was delightful.
Thank you very much.
